Boston Bombing: Toward the Good

Most Read

I grew up in Boston and lived there for the first 30 years of my life, I lived and breathed it, and it was past brutal helplessly watching the scene unfold yesterday from afar. I had walked across that very stretch of unprepossessing sidewalk on Boylston Street countless times, indifferent, elated or despairing, drunk or sober, alone or with friends or family or the woman I came to marry, on hot days, or through a foot of slush in those endless Boston winters, or across windblown leaves in its too-short autumns. And to see blood smeared all across that spot, and those festive balloons, untethered by the blast, rising up into the clear blue—

Words failed. In lieu of words, my mind went where everyone else's did. I offered variations on President Obama's statement that "Boston is a tough and resilient town, so are its people." I consoled myself with the certitude that Bostonians possess some hidden reservoir of strength and character that makes them uniquely capable of enduring the unthinkable, even the senseless murder of a little kid who had just hugged his marathoner father, and the killing of two adults, and the indiscriminate maiming of scores of innocent people.

Such talk of exceptionalism functions partly to buck up the victims, but it also arises from a sense of helplessness. If we can't process the magnitude of the scene ourselves, we hope the affected have something we don't have, to help them cope, to come away stronger because of it, not diminished, not afraid.

Boston does have that thing, of course. Yes, it can be a markedly unfriendly town—I'm not the first to point out that Marathon Monday is the happiest day of the year in what can be an otherwise fractious and standoffish burgh—but anyone who has a deeper understanding of the place knows that while Boston is hard to crack, once you're in, you're in. The people are ferociously loyal and have inexhaustible reserves of heart. All of which we saw yesterday, as marathon attendees raced into danger to help the fallen. It was truly inspiring.

But as clear as it is where my loyalties lay, I think this is important too: It's not that Bostonians have something that makes them uniquely capable of dealing with this. It's that people do. It's just that Bostonians are being called upon to show it now. We've seen this again and again in the face of unthinkable tragedy, be it an act of nature or an atrocity perpetrated by the stupid and the cruel. And while there is a tendency to look at this horror and think people are fking horrible, it's important to remember that they're not, on the whole. Evil lay dormant in the human character, and a few give themselves over to it, but on the whole, good will out. And if we aspire to the good—and things like what happened in Boston help us do so—then that balance will remain favorably tipped.

I was reading Moby Dick on the train to work this morning as a break from the news, while people on either side of me read about Boston in the papers, and I came across this passage:

"Men may seem detestable as joint-stock companies and nations; knaves, fools and murderers there may be; men may have mean and meager faces; but man, in the ideal, is so noble and so sparkling, such a great and glowing creature, that over any ignominious blemish in him all his fellows should run to throw their costliest robes. That immaculate manliness, we feel within ourselves, so far within us, that it remains intact though all the outer character seem gone."

This is the way to think about Bostonians today—and we are—but it's also the way to think about humanity. Out of evil, comes good. And out of greater evil, comes greater good. Let that be the thing we carry from this.